WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Kentucky on Thursday struck down President Joe Biden’s effort to expand protections for transgender students and make other changes to the rules governing sex discrimination in schools, ruling that the Education Department had overstepped and violated teachers’ rights by requiring them to use students’ preferred pronouns.
The ruling, which extends nationwide, came as a major blow to the Biden administration in its effort to provide new safeguards for LGBTQ+ and pregnant students, among others, through Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. It arrived just days before those protections were likely to face more scrutiny under a Trump administration that is expected to be hostile to the new rules and could refuse to defend them in court.
In a 15-page opinion, Chief Judge Danny C. Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky wrote that the Education Department could not lawfully expand the definition of Title IX to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity, as it had proposed last year.
“The entire point of Title IX is to prevent discrimination based on sex,” he wrote. “Throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless.”
In April, the administration announced a revised version of Title IX — a 1972 law that prohibits sex discrimination in educational programs receiving federal funding — that applied more explicitly to transgender students. While it stopped short of some major changes, such as requiring schools to accommodate transgender students in single-sex dorms or sports teams, it generally prohibited schools and their staff from rejecting a student’s gender identity in most everyday contexts.
The changes ran into immediate opposition from Republican-led states, which filed legal challenges, including one brought by Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia and West Virginia that led to the decision Thursday. Through that case and others, the rule had been temporarily blocked in 26 states while state attorneys general and policy groups opposing the changes fought the Education Department over their specifics.
But on Thursday, Reeves definitively ruled against the Biden administration, listing several reasons.
Citing the Supreme Court’s sweeping decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo last year, which limited the regulatory power of federal agencies, Reeves wrote that the Biden administration had overstepped when it sought to enforce its new interpretation of Title IX through federal rulemaking.
But more significantly, the judge also rejected the revised rule on free-speech grounds, writing that it “offends the First Amendment” by potentially requiring educators to use names and pronouns associated with a student’s chosen gender identity.
“Put simply, the First Amendment does not permit the government to chill speech or compel affirmance of a belief with which the speaker disagrees in this manner,” he wrote.
Lastly, he firmly rejected the Education Department’s position that the protections for gay and transgender workers against workplace discrimination established in a landmark 2020 Supreme Court case should also apply in schools.